Rinko (Asuka Kurosawa) is a young woman working as a counselor for a suicide prevention hotline. She is quick to prescribe such advice to her callers as “find what you want to do in life” as a remedy for vanquishing thoughts of self-immolation. She lives at home with her husband Shikehigo (Yuji Kohtari,) a man who could easily be mistaken for her father. The couple live a kind of sexless existence--they do not even sleep in the same room. In fact, I was convinced that Shikehigo was Rinko’s father until an envelope shows up for her, with a warning stating that it should be kept secret from her husband.
Inside the envelope are a series of photographs of Rinko, dressed in a very short skirt, gallivanting about the city--a venture that ends with her presumably masturbating in a fountain. Soon thereafter the calls start and the blackmail begins.
The blackmailer insists that Rinko more or less recreates the events in the photographs, which Rinko swears was an isolated incident, if he is to turn over the negatives. There are a couple of cruel twists that the blackmailer adds. The scene in which Rinko walks through a shopping mall in her short skirt can be rather difficult to watch--the woman is obviously suffering as she attracts more than her share of unwanted attention. The camera tends to linger closely on Rinko's sweat-dappled face, giving the sequence an uncomfortable, claustrophobic feeling. And greater indignities follow.
Once Rinko’s ordeal is over, Shikehigo must face his own trial at the hands of the blackmailer. It is here, at about the film’s forty-five minute mark, that a turn for the weird is taken. At a few points in the film I found myself wondering if what I was seeing was actually happening in the world of the film or if they were projections of a character’s imagination. But as I stated earlier, these deviations from reality are short (but not necessarily sweet).
There are many more revelations, minor and major, but for now I’m going to leave the plot dangling right where it is because I don’t want to spoil too much. I think there’s a lot to chew on thematically here. Rinko, though she leads a life of work and sexual repression, lets her wild side come out--and for that she is roundly punished. What was first a turn-on for her is transformed into a humiliation when the blackmailer forces her to relive the events on his terms. He claims he is doing her a favor by getting her in touch with what she really wants--in a sense, he’s force-feeding her own advice to the would-be suicides right back to her and, while it makes perfectly good sense, this medicine isn’t always so palatable as it’s going down--there’s no spoonful of sugar here. Advice is easy to dispense but hard to follow.
It’s impossible to write any more without dealing with the small abnormality on Rinko’s breast that the photographer/blackmailer notices before even Rinko’s husband does. He urges her to go to the doctor. A diagnosis of breast cancer is confirmed, and we learn that the blackmailer himself is dying as well, presumably from stomach cancer. When Rinko’s cancer goes untreated, the blackmailer becomes enraged and administers a vicious beating to Shikehigo. Perhaps it’s the blackmailer after all who has Rinko’s greatest interests at heart. He challenges her to get in touch with her deepest desires (this movie should be of great interest to Freudians or anyone interested in psychoanalysis) and to undergo the surgery that will mar her beauty but ultimately save her life. What Rinko really does want out of life is greater sexual freedom . . . and because she can’t fulfill those desires with her husband, she is forced to get her fix in other ways.
Rinko and the blackmailer have been handed a death sentence and this mortality salience causes them to act in different ways. Rinko puts her timidity on a shelf on her subsequent short-skirted outings. She is now a confident woman, a bombshell that draws the eye of everyone in the vicinity. The blackmailer, well, he has become a blackmailer, someone willing to commit horrendous crimes against an otherwise timid young woman. The realization of death, then, causes people to act on their darker impulses, you might say. It may seem this way--just look at terror management theory from social psychology. But when you look again, you have to admit that the blackmailer may care more deeply about Rinko than her own husband does. And Rinko having a sex drive is certainly no crime--the real crime is in that she, as a woman but also as a human being, has been taught over and over again to not act out on her sexual impulses. The irony, or perhaps the beauty, in all of this, is that these strange and criminal events do force Rinko and Shikehigo into each others arms so that they can engage in some good old-fashioned screwing.
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